[fic] Fist fights are, in fact, romantic.
Title: Team B: High Seas
Fandom: Torchwood
Word Count: 14,042
Rating: PG-13 for the swears and stuff.
Pairing: None explicit, some (spoilery) implied
Warnings: You have been warned to step away from the fandom. NOW.
Disclaimer: All these characters belong to the BBC. The boat is mine. Muaha.
Notes: In some way, this is Ande's fault. It is also Emma's fault, and Cat's fault. They are all better writers than me, but refused to do it and thus, thus … I had to.
IMPORTANT
This fic will not make any sense if you haven't read Marching Orders. It may not make any sense if you HAVE, but at least then it won't be my fault as the set-up should be clear by that point.
The ship shuddered out of Shanghai harbour as the engines ground and whirred, and a wake big enough to surf on travelled the length of the liner, from bow to stern, parallel with the wave painted between the lowest of the windows. On the top decks, the pleasant and open stern, passengers waved aimlessly at dots on the quay and little boats bobbing in the inky waters behind them, and watched the city drop away like a magic trick.
Inside his admittedly spacious, luxuriant, and light-filled berth, Ianto Jones groaned at the vibrations, pulled a fluffy pillow over his face with feeble hands, and waited with gritted teeth for the painkillers to kick in.
It wasn't just that their first mission hadn't exactly gone to plan - although it really, really hadn't, unless Ianto had missed something and the plan had actually been 'nearly get Mickey killed by a) an alien symbiote posing as a biologist and b) hypothermia caused by attempts to escape from the same, and while we're at it, why not have Ianto almost bleed to death thanks to a stomach wound?' - no, it wasn't just that their mission had gone tits-up.
It was more that the aftermath hadn't been fantastic either - they'd had to break John out of a police station after he showed up back in Anadyr covered in blood and looking dazed, because John was to subtle what icebergs were to the Titanic; in the process Ianto had somewhat predictably pulled his stitches badly, and now the words 'infection', 'penicillin', and 'opiates' were very present in his life, and he was without a doubt going to have a scar across his abdomen which made his appendectomy scar look like a freckle.
Ianto really hoped Jack liked scars.
K-9 was 'on-duty', which essentially meant the little robot dog had to do nothing but stop Ianto from trying to call Cardiff every five minutes - Mickey had confiscated the Vortex Manipulator, but there was a telephone in every room - and to ration out his codeine pills so that after the first three he didn't just start taking the rest willy-nilly in a fog of opiates.
Ianto resented all this enormously, but there wasn't a lot he could do, because every time he tried to get up and argue his stomach felt like it was on fire, and the bandages got stained with pus, and the smell of the pus made him feel sick, but if he was actually sick then he pulled the stitches again and the healing process got set back and there was more pus. Right now he'd given up and was wearing a VISIT SHANGHAI t-shirt and some pyjama bottoms, and was lying on his back feeling somewhat sorry for himself.
The door beeped, then banged open, and Ianto tried to sink into the mattress, willing himself liquid until whoever it was went away again and left him to hurt in peace, but as the laws of physics had yet to cede to human will (regardless of what that whining evangelical prat Pye had insisted throughout his childhood), Ianto remained infuriatingly solid and visible upon the bed, surrounded by a wonderfully soft duvet that he simply couldn't be bothered to pull over himself.
"You know you don't have to stay in here," John pointed out, striding in without a hello and immediately rifling through the bedside drawers in search of something or other - what, Ianto could only guess at and didn't want to think too hard on - and bringing with him the smell of rum-based cocktails and smugness mingled with that manufactured but unfortunately effective waft of 51st-century pheromones. Ianto also resented John's ability to smell like sex all the fucking time.
"What do you want?" Ianto growled, lifting the pillow off his face just enough to make sure John didn't steal anything important.
"Your room tab," John dumped something on the floor, which smashed. "If you are going to sulk all the way to Panama I'm having your booze allowance too. And your meals. And anything else that looks interesting. Oh, but you can't drink on that tedious backwards 21st-century medicine anyway, can you? Boring." He threw something else on the floor. It thumped. "Ooh, holy books. Why would anyone have time to read one of those? There are five bars." He slammed the draw shut. "Come on deck, Eye-Candy. Sea air is good for you. And there are dolphins."
"Approximately how long have you been interested in dolphins?" Ianto asked him suspiciously. "You can't fuck them and you're not allowed to kill them, what possible interest do they have for - you know what, if you can fuck them I desperately do not want to hear about it."
"I don't. You do," John's tone was automatically infuriating, lazy and typically very sure of itself.
"And why would you care what's good for me, you fucking lunatic?" Ianto raised himself woozily onto his elbows, his stomach only twinging a little rather than shrieking out with sudden pus-laced pain as it had done a mere hour before, when he'd taken the pills. "The number of times you've nearly got me killed … don't tell me you've magically developed a sense of compassion."
"The coffee on this ship is complete shit," John admitted with a grin that was more wolfish and less charming than Jack's but still recognisable as coming from the same hand-guide on charisma. Ianto felt suddenly and acutely homesick.
"Please get the hell out," Ianto grumbled, pulling the pillow almost entirely back over his face. "Fall in the sea. Drown. Just go away."
"What, did you want me to have your best interests at black and twisted heart, is that it?" John leered, swinging on the door like a small boy instead of the short, awful, forty-year-old man he actually was. "To nurse you back to health and buy you flowers," he said in a sing-song voice.
"I wouldn't want anything of mine near any organ of yours," Ianto said with great dignity, rolling his eyes against the brushed-cotton pillow case. "I've already got one infection."
"Touchy, touchy," John snorted. "I'm not the one with the inferior immune system." He banged the door behind him.
After that Ianto must have fallen asleep - when he pulled the pillow off his face against at last the shadows were different, longer, and his stomach ached again. He was also incredibly hungry, which was bad, because sitting up to eat was painful and the painkillers also tended to kill his appetite. Something else was different, something was changed, but he couldn't work out what.
"K-9?" he ventured, staring at the ceiling with his eyes screwed up futilely against the pain.
"Master?" the dog beeped.
"What time is it?"
"Time in current location is forty-eight minutes past seven pm and thirty … nine seconds," K-9 said helpfully.
Ianto blinked a startled blink. He didn't think he'd slept for so long, that he could have had that long without one or the other of his teammates coming in to his room to either annoy him or reassure him that he could call back and check on Three, as they'd taken to calling the Hub, when they got to their first week-long stop, in the lovely Chuuk lagoon in the South Seas.
("Jack knows where we are, Ianto," Mickey had pointed out about twenty times while they were still in Shanghai, "if he needs us at all he'll get hold of us right away.")
But K-9 was not capable of lying, and hardly prone to inaccuracy, so nearly eight at night it almost certainly was.
Ianto sat up.
His stomach swore at him in the universal language of Ouch, and the smell of infection hit his nose, the back of his throat, like something solid. It was going to need cleaning, the dressings changing again, and Ianto was never sure he was doing it properly. "I wish Martha was here," he muttered, tightening his hands convulsively to hold back the pain. What he actually wished, if he thought about it for a second, was that he was back in Cardiff, preferably without a gaping abdominal tear.
The thought occurred that he needn't even go out foraging for sustenance - this was after all a hotel, albeit one with an engine room. He'd worked in hotels when he was younger, in the BT (Before Torchwood) years. It was possible he could in fact rely on the magic of room service - they were after all on Torchwood's surprisingly prodigious expense account, John was probably running up the GDP of a major European country in the bar, and who was it who authorized expenses most of the time? That was right. Ianto sodding injured Jones.
He could … the decadence of the idea temporarily stunned him. He could order a bloody sandwich and eat it here, in his pyjamas, and not risk yanking his stitches one iota by getting dressed.
Ianto picked up the phone handset, and got absolute silence. No hiss, no dial tone, no operator. Nothing. So much for that genius idea - he checked that the cable was actually plugged in. It was.
"K-9, why isn't the phone working?" Ianto put the handset back in its cradle.
"Insufficient data."
"Oh, very helpful."
"Sarcasm noted, Master."
Ianto considered just flopping back onto the bed, but his stomach made an angry sound at him, like a deprived dog. "Why am I so hungry?" he muttered.
"Statistical likelihood that Master has digested all consumed nutrients required for maintaining his body."
"I've only been asleep five hours, and I just had a bowl of -"
"Five hours and three days," K-9 corrected.
Ianto stared at the little tin dog, his eyebrows bouncing off each other like the weighted balls of an office toy. "… I … what?"
"Five hours and three days," K-9 beeped. "Minute and second values provided if necessary."
"That's not even possible," Ianto muttered, rubbing his hair. It stood up. "Why didn’t you say so earlier?"
"I was not asked, Master."
Ianto couldn't help rolling his eyes at this. His stomach made another petulant growling sound. "So where are we now?"
K-9 sat silent and dark for a moment. "Insufficient data."
"Insufficient data?" Ianto yelped. "There are GOD KNOWS how many global positioning satellites circling this fucking planet, you must be able to get a fix on one of them, you ridiculous dog - "
There was another lengthy pause, punctuated only by a whirring sound and some low-level beeps. "Unable to make contact with any satellites, Master."
"Alright," Ianto said, a sense of determination underscoring his rumbling belly as he got gingerly to his feet. "I'm going to - ow - to find out what the hell is going on here." There was a short, embarrassed silence, and he added, "K-9?"
"Master?"
"I think it's probably time for another pill."
"Affirmative, Master. Your last pill should have been taken two days and three hours ago." A small drawer between K-9's 'eyes' slid open noiselessly, offering up a single pale orange pill in its exact centre. Ianto swallowed it dry, winced, and closed his eyes.
"If I've been out cold for three days … where are the others? I don't see John managing to keep out of here and not harass me for that long," he mused, mostly to himself.
"Insufficient data. Something is blocking my sensors."
"But what?"
"I do not have sufficient data to determine this, Master. Something is blocking my sensors."
Ianto gave the dog a suspicious look and rubbed his hair again, frowning. "That sounded like sarcasm."
"Master?"
He sighed and put his hand on the door handle. He looked down at himself, at his bare feet, at the off-white bandages visible between the sagging waistband of his pyjama trousers and the hem of his hideous tourist t-shirt. "I really, really hope no one sees me like this. Come on, K-9."
The corridors were eerily quiet and free of any movement, silent as the - Ianto stamped on the simile before it could alarm him further. The ship swayed slightly under his feet and all at once he realised what was missing besides the voices of passengers - the thrum and throb of engines, their vibration and the swish and dip of the liner moving forwards.
"I think we're adrift," he murmured, touching the wall beside him.
"High statistical probability, Master," K-9 agreed, trundling along beside him on the red-and-maroon carpet.
"You can't be sure?"
"Something is blocking - "
"Your sensors. Yes, you said." Ianto stopped to check a huge plastic print of the floor-plan, unsure of what he was looking for - his stomach gurgled impatiently, and he pressed on towards the nearest marked one of the bars.
The whole way there he didn't encounter a single other person or hear another human voice. Ianto began to feel slightly spooked by this all-enveloping silence; he caught a kind of hum, just on the edge of hearing, from the bar, and quickened his pace as much as the jarring on his infected gash would allow.
The bar door's windows were high and round, and Ianto pushed the door open with his shoulder without thinking to check for any threat that might lie beyond them.
He stood in the doorway, his throat working violently, as the door swung back and hit him in the shoulder again almost unfelt; there were a lot of people in the bar, but there were even more flies, their buzzing giving rise to a nauseating frequency of sound to wash over what was already a lunch-losing sight.
Ianto turned his face into his shoulder to cover his nose and mouth and to shut out as much of the sight and smell as he could. "Jesus." He could feel his stomach muscles trying to clench and, for the sake of his wound, he fought the bilious twitches as best he could. The stench was overwhelming, putting his own meagre infection to shame.
After a moment or two steadying himself, Ianto flinched and took a step into the room. It was low-ceilinged, well-lit, and very wide, running maybe a third of the width of the huge ship to large portholes on one side, and opening out through glass doors onto a terraced deck at the back, all the way to the sea. Between Ianto and the sternward doors lay a pool table still racked up for a break, several chairs, a bar with mirrored walls, and about three to four hundred dead passengers sprawled across the floor in a soup of something that might have been congealed blood, if blood could be relied upon to have the consistency of tapioca pudding.
The flies inhabited every face.
Ianto felt his gorge attempting to rise again, and his nostrils flared. He stepped carefully among the bodies, a new violent surge of nausea striking him each time his foot encountered something wet, or solid, or not instantly recognisable as floor. A fly tried to explore his face - Ianto brushed it away and baulked as he realised where else its tiny feet must have already walked.
"No human vital signs in this room except for you, Master," K-9 said, coming in deafeningly loud through the insects, through the fog of opiates and shock.
Ianto swallowed a mouthful of bitter saliva and picked his way towards the stern door like a fastidious housewife through a room the family cat has shat in; he no longer had any real plans besides getting out into the open air so that he could stop gagging and think.
With slow deliberation and an involuntary twitch every time something squelched under his feet, brushing flies away from his face, Ianto made his way to the huge glass doors.
They were shut. He slid them open easily, and once the breeze had blown some of his nervous sweat dry on his brow, he turned back to the desolation he had waded through. K-9 was following with marked difficulty, unable to just step over the corpses as Ianto had.
"Oh, God," Ianto said weakly.
"My thoughts exactly," said John Hart in a hushed voice, right by his ear.
Ianto nearly jumped out of his skin.
"Did you - " Ianto stepped clumsily sideways to get out of the radius of John's breath, which smelt rampantly of some sort of out-of-control distillery, " - did you do all this?"
John gave him a look that took a while to interpret - a little disgusted, a little hurt, a little disappointed. "What? Fuck no … this isn't my style, is it?" he cast around for a minute, apparently taking in the devastation with the air of a connoisseur. "Well maybe occasionally. But what would be the point? I had my eye on at least a dozen people on this floating sin palace." John eyeballed him closely, and Ianto fought with the desire to punch him in the face. "The dishevelled-in-pyjamas look suits you, Eye-Candy. You should try it out in my bed sometime. Or out of pyjamas."
Ianto said, "I can't believe you're trying to flirt in a room full of corpses. Not even you would sink that low. Please tell me you wouldn't."
"Just did." John made a face. "It stinks in here."
"It's full of corpses," Ianto reminded him, a touch hysterically. "Where the hell have you been?" He sighed as he watched the little robot dog take a long detour around what had once been a group of pensioners on some kind of chartered holiday.
John frowned. "I only passed out for a few fucking hours."
"Passed out?"
"What?" John sounded affronted. "Even I get too drunk to function now and then, I'm not the fucking intergalactic boozing champion anymore! We left Shanghai, I got friendly with the expense account and a couple of bar staff, I had a lot of whiskey and a bit of a doze on the golf course down there, the next thing I know I wake up here and find you looking pretty and confused in the middle of barroom carnage."
"You passed out the same day we left Shanghai?" Ianto closed his eyes. "I need more air."
"What are you on about?"
"You've been out for three days," Ianto muttered, stumbling past him into the mercifully fresh and chill salt of the evening's sea air. "And so have I, apparently. K-9?"
"Master?" the little robot struggled out of the bar and onto the deck behind him.
"Any word on where we are?" Ianto leaned hard on a plastic 'garden' table which looked woefully out of place and shut his eyes as the sea air did its best to sweep the scent of death off him. He wondered if it would be unduly feeble to sink onto the floor for a bit.
"Sensors still blocked, Master. Unable to access positioning satellites."
"You can't just figure it out from the Earth's magnetic field?" John scoffed from somewhere behind him. "Some robot you are. Who built you, Sirius Cybernetics?"
"My sensors are blocked," K-9 reiterated. If it was possible for an artificially intelligent metal canine on castors to sound prim, K-9 sounded very prim.
John made a sound of disgust. Ianto straightened up.
"We should find out if anyone else is still alive … and where the hell Mickey is - "
"Oh really?" John sneered. "And who died and made you the leader of this team, tea boy?"
"Hopefully no one," Ianto bit back, rather pointedly.
"I don't have a gun," John pointed out in a whiny voice. He sounded like a child deprived of its favourite toy, which Ianto suspected was very close to being the case.
"We're trying to find people who are still alive, I doubt you with a weapon is going to improve the odds of them staying that way."
"Oh right, and if the thing that killed all those people in there is still on board you're going to snark it to death, is that right?" John snapped.
"I can't just pull a gun out of - " Ianto stopped in mid-sentence and briefly considered what he knew of John Hart, especially the things he'd never wanted to know and been told anyway. John grinned at him and bounced on the toes of his stupid ugly boots. " - and if you can, I don't want to know about it."
"At least let me get a drink," John said, and now he was outright sulky.
"FINE."
John skidded away on the gelatinous covering of the barroom floor, skipped through the bodies like a child through a field of daisies, and vaulted over the bar.
"He's been waiting for ages to do something like that, hasn't he?" Ianto murmured. "Drama queen."
"Master?"
"Nevermind."
John stood up, brandishing a bottle of something golden, and clutching something else in his other hand. He snaked round the bar this time, leading with his hips (Ianto wished for perhaps the millionth time that the man would do his belt up properly; there was very little decent or bearable about a middle-aged man with his hips hanging out, no matter how good a shape he was in), and as soon as he was in range he lobbed something blue and shiny directly at Ianto, who fumbled but caught clumsily against his chest.
It was a packet of KP roasted salted peanuts. Quite what a British brand of snack was doing in a bar on an American-owned ship sailing from China to Panama Ianto wasn't too interested in finding out.
"Dunno about you," John explained, presumably because Ianto looked like he'd just been handed a dog turd, "but I'm bloody ravenous." He tore open his own packet of nuts as he strolled between the corpses.
"How can you possibly still have an appetite after all this?" Ianto said, aghast and still a little surprised by the presence of peanuts at all.
"I'm hungry," John said as if it was the most obvious answer in the world, "I didn't magically become full just because the bar smells of dead tourists."
Ianto caught the obvious call-back of his own idiom, but he simply shoved a peanut into his mouth without any enthusiasm and turned to look at the sea in the hopes that it would stop him feeling so disoriented. It didn't. "K-9?"
"Master?"
"Do you at least have a schematic of the ship?" Ianto asked, fully expecting the answer to be in the negative.
"Affirmative, Master."
"Well thank God for that. Can we get back inside the rest of the ship without going through that bloody bar again?"
"Affirmative. The room next to the bar also opens onto this deck. It is designated 'Ballroom #3: The Hayley Carmichael Ballroom'."
Ianto peered over his shoulder. John was standing in the doorway behind him, drinking tequila from the bottle with his head tipped back and his throat naked and stretched like a bird at a birdbath. "Any idea where Micky might be?"
"None - " John wiped the excess tequila from his lips with his hand and wrist. "Haven't seen him since we left Shanghai, pretty much. He went one way, I went another."
"Exactly … when … did you pass out drunk, John?" Ianto frowned as he jiggled the handle to the ballroom door. It was locked, of course.
John looked almost sheepish. "About an hour and a half after I tried to force you to have some fun for once and you stupidly refused."
Ianto stared at him for a minute, managed to contain his irritation, and said, "An hour and a half?"
"Look, have you ever tried to down a litre of whiskey in one?" John said, becoming quite embarrassed and fidgety. "I'm out of practice, it's this fucking era of yours, everything is so tame, you're all lightweights …"
"No, I haven't." Ianto jiggled the door handle again. "K-9, would you?" he added, "Because I am neither insane nor suicidal." He kept the 'anymore' part to himself: on the very long list of personal information John Hart had no reason to be introduced to, how he'd felt and behaved after losing Lisa was quite close to the 'NEVER EVER ANY OF HIS FUCKING BUSINESS' header. "K-9?"
"Master?"
"Unlock this, would you?" Ianto's stomach gurgled and he hastened to silence it with more slightly flatulent peanuts.
"Why so desperate to find old Mick-aye Smiff anyway?" John remarked, stepping through the door as it opened and giving the empty room a quick sweep, a narrow-eyed reconnaissance stare.
"One, he's in charge of this team," Ianto growled, following him at a distance. The distance was one he'd calculated on the plane to Shanghai from Heathrow, the optimum distance for remaining out of John's horrible personal-space invasion tactics, but close enough to be able to throttle him to death when Ianto's temper finally snapped.
"Nominally," John sneered, poking a spangly blue curtain with the butt of his tequila bottle.
"Two, he has the only potential means of communication we have with the outside world. Everything else seems to be dead." Ianto was aware of slurring a little thanks to the bloody codeine, but he also wasn't aware of his infected gouge anymore, which was, he thought, an acceptable trade. "So far I don't know how long we've been adrift, where we are, or if anything or anyone has been able to track us. The Pacific Ocean is big, John, I want to get hold of Cardiff and get us some bloody help!"
"And Mickey has my Vortex Manipulator," John said, peering behind the curtain. "Oooh, fireworks."
"And Mickey has the Vortex Manipulator," Ianto finished. "You don't seem … bothered."
"This is a nice ship. You know if there's been any externally-generated major temporal distortion that thing will be malfunctioning like a toddler with a head-injury," John added, returning with a cardboard box of what Ianto hoped weren't but suspected probably were fireworks. "Design flaw. Bit of a huge one, really. It's how the Lovely Jack and I ended up stuck in a Time Loop for five wildly romantic years. Partly."
Ianto ignored the goad with greater ease than he might have done a few hours - three days - ago; the codeine was good for that, too. "Temporal distortion? Why the hell would there be - "
"We were out for three days," John said, examining a yellow box marked ' Firecra'. "If your fucking dog isn't lying. Which it probably is. But, y'know, even when I'm re-growing my entire liver from the back-up patch I'm not out that fucking long. When was the last time you spent three days flat on your back … " John trailed off and leered at him, "… and unconscious?"
"Put those down," Ianto said, barely containing a twitch.
"Spoilsport," John said, stuffing a box of 'herine Wheel' into his inside jacket pocket. "You never know when you might need something to explode a little."
"What is that, your family motto?" Ianto sighed, leaving the ballroom via the back door.
"No, that was money always comes first," John said without even a trace of mirth, not even the hint of a smile. "Penge altid kommer først, para önce tüm."
The first three corridors they explored were empty and silent, though the third was partially blocked at the other end by the already-festering body of a plump holiday-maker in a red baseball cap. John sidestepped around the hapless cruise passenger without breaking his pace; Ianto put his free hand over his nose and mouth, spilling peanuts from the open packet he still clutched with the other.
"Why are we alive if all these people aren't?" He asked, muffled by his fingers but not at all keen to remove his hand for the sake of mere clarity.
"Don't question good luck," John suggested, bounding down the next corridor with his tequila raised like a club over his head. "Otherwise it stops being lucky."
"I don't believe in luck."
"Really? You know what your darling Captain's nickname was at the Agency?" John kicked a body in some sort of service uniform out of Ianto's way and took an exaggerated swig of his tequila.
"I'm not interested in his life before Torchwood," Ianto said stiffly. It was probably obvious just how much it bothered Ianto that John had known Jack for longer than he; at this moment he didn't really care what John did and didn't know about that.
"Liar," John said cheerfully, pointing the lip of the bottle at Ianto's face. "And his name was Lucky."
"Oh, and what was yours? Arsehole?" Ianto muttered, tip-toeing between two small bodies, trying desperately not to let his bare, dry-dirty toes touch the slimmest millimetre of what had once been a pair of little girls in sailor dresses.
"Actually it was 'Mr. Deathwish'," John paused by an open doorway and held up a finger. He craned his head into the room, then relaxed. "Thought I could hear breathing but it's just flies having a fucking party," he said, as if this were in any way reassuring.
"Maybe we should check them for injuries …" Ianto choked on the stink as John kicked another corpse into the corridor walls ahead of him. "That you haven't inflicted post-mortem! STOP THAT."
John looked affronted. "I was getting them out of the way, so you don't get dead person on your skin," he explained, as though Ianto was stupid rather than simply possessed of a functioning sense of humanity. "They can't feel it, they're dead."
By Ianto's watch they spent two whole hours prowling the corridors, bars, and upper internal decks, and not once did they encounter another living being that wasn't a fly or a trapped and very angry seagull. By the time Ianto and John reached the service decks, where the corridors were narrower and the windows smaller, in the lower reaches of the ship, it was dark outside and Ianto's gut wound was aching again, working its way up to a proper sharp pain, and his temper was not so much frayed as unravelled. He was also very hungry.
"Kitchens," he told K-9. "Find me the kitchens, there has to be some dried food or something in there - " he was interrupted by a noisy gurgle from his stomach, which apparently agreed with him. Ahead of him John bounced over and around a veritable obstacle course of dead maids and stewards. Ianto was a little disturbed by how normal he was coming to find both the behaviour and its prompt.
"Anyone aliiiiiiiive?" John bellowed, banging on doors.
There was a creak.
Both of them froze.
"K-9?" Ianto whispered.
"One live human female in room F-22," K-9 said loudly.
"So much for subtlety," Ianto wearily raised his foot over an extended arm that still held a mobile phone handset, its screen blank, and counted doors to F-22, keeping his eyes resolutely above floor level. "John, if you don't mind …" he added, as John blocked the last few feet.
"If she shoots you," John began. He still had his empty tequila bottle with him, gripped tight by the neck. Ianto rather suspected the end of the sentence was going to be something like I'm going to use you as a shield, you realise?
"I will be very surprised," Ianto said. He banged on the door to F-22 slightly too hard. "Hello? Anyone in there? Hello?"
Silence was the only reply.
"Hello?" Ianto repeated. "We're not dangerous … well, I'm not … we're just looking for other survivors … Hello? If you're in there, please say something, we want to help you … hello?"
"Hello," John added helpfully, "I can't shoot you because I don't have a gun, and Ianto is morally opposed to violence sometimes! Come out! I'm incredibly good-looking! You won't regret it!"
"You would actually make my job easier by committing suicide," Ianto said in a strained voice. "Hello? Is anyone in there?"
Finally the door was unlocked, the clunk of the mechanism loud in the quiet corridor, and Ianto exhaled with relief as he looked down several inches at an anxious face.
"Hello," he said, "I'm Ianto Jones, this is John Hart - "
"Captain," John said sulkily.
"- are you okay?"
The short woman in the doorway stared at him for a moment before saying in a too-loud voice, "Other ear, please."
"Pardon?" Ianto blinked, temporarily non-plussed.
The woman in F-22 was very short - five foot three at most - and wearing kitchen whites without a hairnet over her short black hair. She turned her head and tapped her left ear. "My right ear doesn't work," she said in the same slightly congested tones. "Please say that again."
"Ianto Jones," Ianto repeated, trying to shape his words clearly and use better diction that he usually bothered with, "and John Hart."
"Captain," John repeated.
She nodded to indicate she'd got it this time. "Frankie Hao Lin."
"Frankie?" John snorted. Ianto sighed.
"Easier for you to say than Xiu," Frankie said with a polite attempt at a smile that, Ianto thought, probably masked considerable and entirely deserved contempt. "What is happening?"
"We don't - " Ianto began.
"Dead bodies," John interrupted, far too cheerfully. "Everyone's dead. Except us."
"I know," Frankie said patiently, although she also sounded a little taken aback, "this is why I stayed in my room."
"You got a gun in there?" John asked, and Ianto groaned.
"What did he say?"
"Ignore him, please, he's insane," Ianto suggested.
"I'm not the one walking around a ship full of corpses in my bare feet with an open wound," John observed, "so don't you go impugning my sanity, Eye-Candy."
"Why is he talking about guns?" Frankie asked, too loudly to be whispering. "Is this man your friend?" She looked very worried, and adjusted something behind her right ear - her hearing aid, Ianto supposed.
"NO," he said emphatically.
John was behind him in a single leap, draping an arm over Ianto's shoulder - which he had to stretch up to do - as if he owned him.
"Get off."
"No, he's my lov-er," John drawled.
"I am not, get OFF me," Ianto tried to shrug off the arm.
"We were on our honeymoon," John continued with maddening smarm, bumping Ianto with his hips.
Anger bubbled up through Ianto like gas through swamp water; once upon a time he had planned to get married, he'd tried to guess where he could take Lisa on honeymoon that would be a surprise, that would excite her without making her exasperated that he'd tried too hard, and being reminded of this fact hurt more than a direct poke to the festering hole in his midriff. Through gritted teeth Ianto growled, "Isn't it amazing how I can speak two languages and I still can't find one word in either of them that adequately covers just how much I FUCKING HATE YOU?"
John whipped his arm away without making the usual remark about Ianto being 'beautiful when angry' - Ianto could feel his face burning in the ringing silence that followed his outburst and although he didn't look he could guess that poor Frankie was staring at him. He put his hands over his face - it was hot - and breathed in for so long that his stomach twinged, and finally said in a very quiet voice, "we still need to find Mickey."
"Excuse me," Frankie said, looking from one to the other.
"Yes?" Ianto pulled his hands away from his face. He felt sure he looked like a crazy person, and what with John in the same frame of reference that was entirely unfair.
"Are you leaving?"
"Yes," Ianto sighed. "Yes. Sorry. Yes, we are."
There was a very long silence during which Frankie looked at him and Ianto tried to read her expression and failed, and John began to hum something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like We Are The Champions and Ianto had to bite his lip to remind himself that punching John in the head until he stopped looking and sounding like John would not really put Frankie at ease. Finally he took a step back and said, "Er …do you want to come with us?"
She brightened immediately. "If it isn't any trouble. I don't want to get in your way."
"No trouble."
"I don't want to inconvenience you at all."
John shoved Ianto along the corridor ahead of him and barked over his shoulder, "Stop being fucking polite and get moving."
Frankie stepped out into the corridor, baulked immediately at the banks of corpses piled up against the walls, and stared for a moment at K-9. "What is - "
"That's K-9," Ianto said wearily.
"Robot dog from the future," John elaborated.
"John, shut."
Frankie shrugged, as if to say she'd seen weirder things working on a cruise ship, and averted her gaze from the maids lying on the carpet. A thought struck Ianto. "How …. How long have you been hiding in there?" he pointed back to the room.
"Hours."
"Hours, and not days?" he persisted.
"We were in Shanghai yesterday …" Frankie trailed off and gave Ianto a suspicious look. "…weren't we?"
Ianto shook his head. "What's the last thing you remember before finding … well, before all this … all this happened?"
"I was … I had to take a break from my shift, I had a …" Frankie mimed clutching her stomach and screwed up her face, "… a sickness, a bad one. My lunch was not very fresh. Mr. Denton was embarrassed by this so he said I should sleep until I felt better and he wouldn't take it out of my wages."
"And that's what you did?" The three of them followed K-9 back towards the door they'd entered the corridor by.
"Yes, I slept until I felt better." Frankie turned her head away from a hand that protruded, limp and fly-strewn, from an open door. "I wish I was not such a heavy sleeper."
"I slept through it too," Ianto said gently, "and I'm a very light sleeper. I think something's not right here."
"I think the correct phrase to use now is 'no shit, Sherlock'," John sneered, shoving past them to investigate the staircase with his tequila-club in hand. "Right, Dog, I have to carry you, do I? You're rubbish. Why can't you hover? I could have made a better fucking robot when I was six out of the contents of the bin - "
"Shut up, John," Ianto sighed.
John scooped up K-9 with bad grace and glared back over his shoulder at Ianto and Frankie. "So if we meet anything dangerous what am I going to do, throw Winalot here at them?"
"K-9 can hold them off," Ianto decided not to mention the little dog's laser capabilities until it was absolutely necessary for John to know about them.
"With what, pedantry?"
"John, shut up."
As John trudged up the stairs with K-9 in his arms, bitching under his breath at every step, Frankie whispered to Ianto, "Is he …?" concluding with a fairly graphic and easy-to-interpret gesture.
"Er, no, more …" Ianto made a circular 'everyone' gesture.
"Oh. And … um … you?"
Ianto thought about this for a while, taking the stairs slowly, one at a time. "I'm …" he reached the first landing. "I'm … taken."
"No you're not," John said from half-way up the next flight of stairs. "He doesn't care and you know he doesn't, you're just deluding yourself - "
"K-9," Ianto said in a loud voice, "feel free to electrocute John when you get to the Top Deck. As many volts as you can spare."
The rest of the journey was undertaken more or less in silence; Ianto had to go ahead of John to wrestle with the final door-handle and nearly fell on hid face as he forgot about the six-inch-high metal lip of the doorway. The only thing that stopped him was John's forearm as the man tucked K-9 into his opposite armpit and blocked the doorway with his free arm.
"You're not fit to lead a pillow fight," John said, jumping out onto the salt-slippery deck and depositing the robot without much in the way of care.
Ianto inhaled. The air was clear and clean and salty, and he could tell there must be more unfortunate bodies some fifty yards down from them, for a flock of assorted seabirds had congregated on one spot and were making a truly infernal racket as they squabbled and bounced and sniped at each other. Ianto had never been particularly comfortable with the cries of seagulls - they always sounded like they were laughing - and with the addition of a wide gamut of other avian opportunists to the cacophony the whole chorus sounded like half of hell had got loose and got drunk.
"You really think Mickey's up here?" he asked, doubting it already.
John shrugged. "It doesn't smell as bad as inside, does it?"
Ianto turned to help Frankie over the lip of the door but she'd already made her own way over; he supposed if she worked on the ship she probably already had plenty of practice dealing with the bizarre doorways.
The three of them and K-9 began heading bow-wards, towards the cloud of seabirds, and Ianto realised the end of his bandage had come loose.
As they got closer the cries of the fighting birds grew louder and harsher, until, within twenty feet or so, they were so violent and raucous that Ianto winced at them. John ran at the birds, waving his arms and shouting, and the whole great cloud of them - some of which he'd only ever seen on TV before - took off like a picnic blanket being unfurled.
They didn't stay away long, but it was long enough for everyone to catch a glimpse of what they had been feeding upon; the slightly bloated forms of one adult and one child.
The birds had been at them so thoroughly that it was impossible to tell the sex or race of either, and from both bodies long ropes of stinking entrails had been tugged by fierce bird beaks, flopping in great grey cables as they uncoiled around the bared flesh and stained clothing. Ianto's throat closed over at once - he saw Frankie's eyes widen, and she clamped her hand over her mouth.
They both dashed for the side of the ship, but it was Frankie, unhindered by a rotting gut wound that jarred at every step, who got there first.
What happened next was to haunt Ianto for many worried years to come, which, in a lifetime as full of traumas as his had already been, was something of an achievement.
As Frankie stood on tip-toes and gripped the rail to steady herself, her back heaving, something long and dark and wide and impossibly fast zipped out of the dark waters like a bad dream - the first Ianto saw of it was the towering, dripping, shadowy thing slipping itself around Frankie's waist like an affectionate arm.
She yelled, but before Ianto could even blink both tentacle and cook had gone, and the wheeling, shrieking seabirds had already begun to settle on their morbid supper again.
"Did that just happen?" Ianto asked in a shrill voice, very rattled indeed. He wanted to hold something to keep himself upright, but the options were John and a railing over which someone had just disappeared, and neither seemed particularly safe. "Did a fucking huge tentacle just - "
John nodded, an inappropriate and alarming light dancing in his eyes like the reflection of a burning building. "When I come from those things are extinct," he said, his teeth gleaming under the ship's floodlights. "They were just a footnote in one class on naturally occurring time manipulating species … I spent three fucking days trying to sleep through hours and hours of crap about Why Gallifrey Was An Example To Us All About How Neutrality Can Never Work - but those things - "
"Wait - wait - wait - " Ianto squeezed his eyes shut. The afterimage of Frankie vanishing into the night remained. "What are you talking about? A tentacle just pulled Frankie into the fucking sea, we've got to save her … somehow …"
"No it didn't," John said, his eyes still sparkling.
"What? I just saw - "
"It pulled her into a temporal pocket." John looked like he'd just stumbled on a goldmine guarded by a dormouse. "K-9!"
K-9 remained silent.
"K-9, can you scan for recent temporal distortions and prove my bloody point to Mr. Slow here?" John was all but skipping from foot to foot.
K-9 said nothing.
"Don't ignore me, you miserable piece of tin shit!"
"I am not programmed to take orders from you," K-9 beeped.
"YOU WHAT?"
Ianto turned back to stare at the dark sea which rocked the huge ship like a gentle hand. There was not so much as a ripple to act as a sign of anything lurking below the water. "K-9, humour him, please."
"Humouring." There was a grinding beep that sounded unpleasantly like a computer with toast in the disk drive.
"Massive temporal distortion has just occurred five point two feet from John Hart." K-9 confirmed.
"I told you." John stared out to sea. "If I could only get one of those fuckers back to … I could make a fortune. I could buy a galaxy with that kind of money. No one's seen one for thousands of years …"
"John," Ianto said, too tired to be anything but exasperated, "we have to rescue Frankie if there's any chance she's still alive - it's our fault she was up here - "
"Actually it was your fault," John grinned and bounced on his toes.
" - that thing might have other people wherever it's taken her - "
"What?" John dragged his gaze away from the ocean again. "Probably." He sounded distracted. "The question is how I'd catch one in this backward bloody century - "
"John," Ianto snapped. "Rescue, not … hunting." He tried to tuck the end of his bandage into his pyjama trousers, but it just fell back out again right away. His hands were, he noticed, beginning to shake a little. Not at all helpful for staging a rescue attempt against something the size of a … well, something with tentacles that big. "I suppose if we just stay here it'll come back for us?"
"Eh?" John gave him a you are insane look. "Hell no."
"You're right," Ianto murmured, no longer really listening, putting the heels of his hands to his temples, trying to force his thoughts clear through sheer effort of will, "we need some sort of a -"
Which was as far as he got. A splash caught his attention and truncated his sentence. He didn't have time to do more than try to work out from where it had come before several thick feet of slimy, ice-cold muscle slapped itself around his midriff and tugged.
The pain from his wound was so excruciating, so staggeringly intense from nowhere, that Ianto promptly lost his grip on consciousness and tumbled into the engulfing arms of the black.
PART TWO
Fandom: Torchwood
Word Count: 14,042
Rating: PG-13 for the swears and stuff.
Pairing: None explicit, some (spoilery) implied
Warnings: You have been warned to step away from the fandom. NOW.
Disclaimer: All these characters belong to the BBC. The boat is mine. Muaha.
Notes: In some way, this is Ande's fault. It is also Emma's fault, and Cat's fault. They are all better writers than me, but refused to do it and thus, thus … I had to.
IMPORTANT
This fic will not make any sense if you haven't read Marching Orders. It may not make any sense if you HAVE, but at least then it won't be my fault as the set-up should be clear by that point.
The ship shuddered out of Shanghai harbour as the engines ground and whirred, and a wake big enough to surf on travelled the length of the liner, from bow to stern, parallel with the wave painted between the lowest of the windows. On the top decks, the pleasant and open stern, passengers waved aimlessly at dots on the quay and little boats bobbing in the inky waters behind them, and watched the city drop away like a magic trick.
Inside his admittedly spacious, luxuriant, and light-filled berth, Ianto Jones groaned at the vibrations, pulled a fluffy pillow over his face with feeble hands, and waited with gritted teeth for the painkillers to kick in.
It wasn't just that their first mission hadn't exactly gone to plan - although it really, really hadn't, unless Ianto had missed something and the plan had actually been 'nearly get Mickey killed by a) an alien symbiote posing as a biologist and b) hypothermia caused by attempts to escape from the same, and while we're at it, why not have Ianto almost bleed to death thanks to a stomach wound?' - no, it wasn't just that their mission had gone tits-up.
It was more that the aftermath hadn't been fantastic either - they'd had to break John out of a police station after he showed up back in Anadyr covered in blood and looking dazed, because John was to subtle what icebergs were to the Titanic; in the process Ianto had somewhat predictably pulled his stitches badly, and now the words 'infection', 'penicillin', and 'opiates' were very present in his life, and he was without a doubt going to have a scar across his abdomen which made his appendectomy scar look like a freckle.
Ianto really hoped Jack liked scars.
K-9 was 'on-duty', which essentially meant the little robot dog had to do nothing but stop Ianto from trying to call Cardiff every five minutes - Mickey had confiscated the Vortex Manipulator, but there was a telephone in every room - and to ration out his codeine pills so that after the first three he didn't just start taking the rest willy-nilly in a fog of opiates.
Ianto resented all this enormously, but there wasn't a lot he could do, because every time he tried to get up and argue his stomach felt like it was on fire, and the bandages got stained with pus, and the smell of the pus made him feel sick, but if he was actually sick then he pulled the stitches again and the healing process got set back and there was more pus. Right now he'd given up and was wearing a VISIT SHANGHAI t-shirt and some pyjama bottoms, and was lying on his back feeling somewhat sorry for himself.
The door beeped, then banged open, and Ianto tried to sink into the mattress, willing himself liquid until whoever it was went away again and left him to hurt in peace, but as the laws of physics had yet to cede to human will (regardless of what that whining evangelical prat Pye had insisted throughout his childhood), Ianto remained infuriatingly solid and visible upon the bed, surrounded by a wonderfully soft duvet that he simply couldn't be bothered to pull over himself.
"You know you don't have to stay in here," John pointed out, striding in without a hello and immediately rifling through the bedside drawers in search of something or other - what, Ianto could only guess at and didn't want to think too hard on - and bringing with him the smell of rum-based cocktails and smugness mingled with that manufactured but unfortunately effective waft of 51st-century pheromones. Ianto also resented John's ability to smell like sex all the fucking time.
"What do you want?" Ianto growled, lifting the pillow off his face just enough to make sure John didn't steal anything important.
"Your room tab," John dumped something on the floor, which smashed. "If you are going to sulk all the way to Panama I'm having your booze allowance too. And your meals. And anything else that looks interesting. Oh, but you can't drink on that tedious backwards 21st-century medicine anyway, can you? Boring." He threw something else on the floor. It thumped. "Ooh, holy books. Why would anyone have time to read one of those? There are five bars." He slammed the draw shut. "Come on deck, Eye-Candy. Sea air is good for you. And there are dolphins."
"Approximately how long have you been interested in dolphins?" Ianto asked him suspiciously. "You can't fuck them and you're not allowed to kill them, what possible interest do they have for - you know what, if you can fuck them I desperately do not want to hear about it."
"I don't. You do," John's tone was automatically infuriating, lazy and typically very sure of itself.
"And why would you care what's good for me, you fucking lunatic?" Ianto raised himself woozily onto his elbows, his stomach only twinging a little rather than shrieking out with sudden pus-laced pain as it had done a mere hour before, when he'd taken the pills. "The number of times you've nearly got me killed … don't tell me you've magically developed a sense of compassion."
"The coffee on this ship is complete shit," John admitted with a grin that was more wolfish and less charming than Jack's but still recognisable as coming from the same hand-guide on charisma. Ianto felt suddenly and acutely homesick.
"Please get the hell out," Ianto grumbled, pulling the pillow almost entirely back over his face. "Fall in the sea. Drown. Just go away."
"What, did you want me to have your best interests at black and twisted heart, is that it?" John leered, swinging on the door like a small boy instead of the short, awful, forty-year-old man he actually was. "To nurse you back to health and buy you flowers," he said in a sing-song voice.
"I wouldn't want anything of mine near any organ of yours," Ianto said with great dignity, rolling his eyes against the brushed-cotton pillow case. "I've already got one infection."
"Touchy, touchy," John snorted. "I'm not the one with the inferior immune system." He banged the door behind him.
After that Ianto must have fallen asleep - when he pulled the pillow off his face against at last the shadows were different, longer, and his stomach ached again. He was also incredibly hungry, which was bad, because sitting up to eat was painful and the painkillers also tended to kill his appetite. Something else was different, something was changed, but he couldn't work out what.
"K-9?" he ventured, staring at the ceiling with his eyes screwed up futilely against the pain.
"Master?" the dog beeped.
"What time is it?"
"Time in current location is forty-eight minutes past seven pm and thirty … nine seconds," K-9 said helpfully.
Ianto blinked a startled blink. He didn't think he'd slept for so long, that he could have had that long without one or the other of his teammates coming in to his room to either annoy him or reassure him that he could call back and check on Three, as they'd taken to calling the Hub, when they got to their first week-long stop, in the lovely Chuuk lagoon in the South Seas.
("Jack knows where we are, Ianto," Mickey had pointed out about twenty times while they were still in Shanghai, "if he needs us at all he'll get hold of us right away.")
But K-9 was not capable of lying, and hardly prone to inaccuracy, so nearly eight at night it almost certainly was.
Ianto sat up.
His stomach swore at him in the universal language of Ouch, and the smell of infection hit his nose, the back of his throat, like something solid. It was going to need cleaning, the dressings changing again, and Ianto was never sure he was doing it properly. "I wish Martha was here," he muttered, tightening his hands convulsively to hold back the pain. What he actually wished, if he thought about it for a second, was that he was back in Cardiff, preferably without a gaping abdominal tear.
The thought occurred that he needn't even go out foraging for sustenance - this was after all a hotel, albeit one with an engine room. He'd worked in hotels when he was younger, in the BT (Before Torchwood) years. It was possible he could in fact rely on the magic of room service - they were after all on Torchwood's surprisingly prodigious expense account, John was probably running up the GDP of a major European country in the bar, and who was it who authorized expenses most of the time? That was right. Ianto sodding injured Jones.
He could … the decadence of the idea temporarily stunned him. He could order a bloody sandwich and eat it here, in his pyjamas, and not risk yanking his stitches one iota by getting dressed.
Ianto picked up the phone handset, and got absolute silence. No hiss, no dial tone, no operator. Nothing. So much for that genius idea - he checked that the cable was actually plugged in. It was.
"K-9, why isn't the phone working?" Ianto put the handset back in its cradle.
"Insufficient data."
"Oh, very helpful."
"Sarcasm noted, Master."
Ianto considered just flopping back onto the bed, but his stomach made an angry sound at him, like a deprived dog. "Why am I so hungry?" he muttered.
"Statistical likelihood that Master has digested all consumed nutrients required for maintaining his body."
"I've only been asleep five hours, and I just had a bowl of -"
"Five hours and three days," K-9 corrected.
Ianto stared at the little tin dog, his eyebrows bouncing off each other like the weighted balls of an office toy. "… I … what?"
"Five hours and three days," K-9 beeped. "Minute and second values provided if necessary."
"That's not even possible," Ianto muttered, rubbing his hair. It stood up. "Why didn’t you say so earlier?"
"I was not asked, Master."
Ianto couldn't help rolling his eyes at this. His stomach made another petulant growling sound. "So where are we now?"
K-9 sat silent and dark for a moment. "Insufficient data."
"Insufficient data?" Ianto yelped. "There are GOD KNOWS how many global positioning satellites circling this fucking planet, you must be able to get a fix on one of them, you ridiculous dog - "
There was another lengthy pause, punctuated only by a whirring sound and some low-level beeps. "Unable to make contact with any satellites, Master."
"Alright," Ianto said, a sense of determination underscoring his rumbling belly as he got gingerly to his feet. "I'm going to - ow - to find out what the hell is going on here." There was a short, embarrassed silence, and he added, "K-9?"
"Master?"
"I think it's probably time for another pill."
"Affirmative, Master. Your last pill should have been taken two days and three hours ago." A small drawer between K-9's 'eyes' slid open noiselessly, offering up a single pale orange pill in its exact centre. Ianto swallowed it dry, winced, and closed his eyes.
"If I've been out cold for three days … where are the others? I don't see John managing to keep out of here and not harass me for that long," he mused, mostly to himself.
"Insufficient data. Something is blocking my sensors."
"But what?"
"I do not have sufficient data to determine this, Master. Something is blocking my sensors."
Ianto gave the dog a suspicious look and rubbed his hair again, frowning. "That sounded like sarcasm."
"Master?"
He sighed and put his hand on the door handle. He looked down at himself, at his bare feet, at the off-white bandages visible between the sagging waistband of his pyjama trousers and the hem of his hideous tourist t-shirt. "I really, really hope no one sees me like this. Come on, K-9."
The corridors were eerily quiet and free of any movement, silent as the - Ianto stamped on the simile before it could alarm him further. The ship swayed slightly under his feet and all at once he realised what was missing besides the voices of passengers - the thrum and throb of engines, their vibration and the swish and dip of the liner moving forwards.
"I think we're adrift," he murmured, touching the wall beside him.
"High statistical probability, Master," K-9 agreed, trundling along beside him on the red-and-maroon carpet.
"You can't be sure?"
"Something is blocking - "
"Your sensors. Yes, you said." Ianto stopped to check a huge plastic print of the floor-plan, unsure of what he was looking for - his stomach gurgled impatiently, and he pressed on towards the nearest marked one of the bars.
The whole way there he didn't encounter a single other person or hear another human voice. Ianto began to feel slightly spooked by this all-enveloping silence; he caught a kind of hum, just on the edge of hearing, from the bar, and quickened his pace as much as the jarring on his infected gash would allow.
The bar door's windows were high and round, and Ianto pushed the door open with his shoulder without thinking to check for any threat that might lie beyond them.
He stood in the doorway, his throat working violently, as the door swung back and hit him in the shoulder again almost unfelt; there were a lot of people in the bar, but there were even more flies, their buzzing giving rise to a nauseating frequency of sound to wash over what was already a lunch-losing sight.
Ianto turned his face into his shoulder to cover his nose and mouth and to shut out as much of the sight and smell as he could. "Jesus." He could feel his stomach muscles trying to clench and, for the sake of his wound, he fought the bilious twitches as best he could. The stench was overwhelming, putting his own meagre infection to shame.
After a moment or two steadying himself, Ianto flinched and took a step into the room. It was low-ceilinged, well-lit, and very wide, running maybe a third of the width of the huge ship to large portholes on one side, and opening out through glass doors onto a terraced deck at the back, all the way to the sea. Between Ianto and the sternward doors lay a pool table still racked up for a break, several chairs, a bar with mirrored walls, and about three to four hundred dead passengers sprawled across the floor in a soup of something that might have been congealed blood, if blood could be relied upon to have the consistency of tapioca pudding.
The flies inhabited every face.
Ianto felt his gorge attempting to rise again, and his nostrils flared. He stepped carefully among the bodies, a new violent surge of nausea striking him each time his foot encountered something wet, or solid, or not instantly recognisable as floor. A fly tried to explore his face - Ianto brushed it away and baulked as he realised where else its tiny feet must have already walked.
"No human vital signs in this room except for you, Master," K-9 said, coming in deafeningly loud through the insects, through the fog of opiates and shock.
Ianto swallowed a mouthful of bitter saliva and picked his way towards the stern door like a fastidious housewife through a room the family cat has shat in; he no longer had any real plans besides getting out into the open air so that he could stop gagging and think.
With slow deliberation and an involuntary twitch every time something squelched under his feet, brushing flies away from his face, Ianto made his way to the huge glass doors.
They were shut. He slid them open easily, and once the breeze had blown some of his nervous sweat dry on his brow, he turned back to the desolation he had waded through. K-9 was following with marked difficulty, unable to just step over the corpses as Ianto had.
"Oh, God," Ianto said weakly.
"My thoughts exactly," said John Hart in a hushed voice, right by his ear.
Ianto nearly jumped out of his skin.
"Did you - " Ianto stepped clumsily sideways to get out of the radius of John's breath, which smelt rampantly of some sort of out-of-control distillery, " - did you do all this?"
John gave him a look that took a while to interpret - a little disgusted, a little hurt, a little disappointed. "What? Fuck no … this isn't my style, is it?" he cast around for a minute, apparently taking in the devastation with the air of a connoisseur. "Well maybe occasionally. But what would be the point? I had my eye on at least a dozen people on this floating sin palace." John eyeballed him closely, and Ianto fought with the desire to punch him in the face. "The dishevelled-in-pyjamas look suits you, Eye-Candy. You should try it out in my bed sometime. Or out of pyjamas."
Ianto said, "I can't believe you're trying to flirt in a room full of corpses. Not even you would sink that low. Please tell me you wouldn't."
"Just did." John made a face. "It stinks in here."
"It's full of corpses," Ianto reminded him, a touch hysterically. "Where the hell have you been?" He sighed as he watched the little robot dog take a long detour around what had once been a group of pensioners on some kind of chartered holiday.
John frowned. "I only passed out for a few fucking hours."
"Passed out?"
"What?" John sounded affronted. "Even I get too drunk to function now and then, I'm not the fucking intergalactic boozing champion anymore! We left Shanghai, I got friendly with the expense account and a couple of bar staff, I had a lot of whiskey and a bit of a doze on the golf course down there, the next thing I know I wake up here and find you looking pretty and confused in the middle of barroom carnage."
"You passed out the same day we left Shanghai?" Ianto closed his eyes. "I need more air."
"What are you on about?"
"You've been out for three days," Ianto muttered, stumbling past him into the mercifully fresh and chill salt of the evening's sea air. "And so have I, apparently. K-9?"
"Master?" the little robot struggled out of the bar and onto the deck behind him.
"Any word on where we are?" Ianto leaned hard on a plastic 'garden' table which looked woefully out of place and shut his eyes as the sea air did its best to sweep the scent of death off him. He wondered if it would be unduly feeble to sink onto the floor for a bit.
"Sensors still blocked, Master. Unable to access positioning satellites."
"You can't just figure it out from the Earth's magnetic field?" John scoffed from somewhere behind him. "Some robot you are. Who built you, Sirius Cybernetics?"
"My sensors are blocked," K-9 reiterated. If it was possible for an artificially intelligent metal canine on castors to sound prim, K-9 sounded very prim.
John made a sound of disgust. Ianto straightened up.
"We should find out if anyone else is still alive … and where the hell Mickey is - "
"Oh really?" John sneered. "And who died and made you the leader of this team, tea boy?"
"Hopefully no one," Ianto bit back, rather pointedly.
"I don't have a gun," John pointed out in a whiny voice. He sounded like a child deprived of its favourite toy, which Ianto suspected was very close to being the case.
"We're trying to find people who are still alive, I doubt you with a weapon is going to improve the odds of them staying that way."
"Oh right, and if the thing that killed all those people in there is still on board you're going to snark it to death, is that right?" John snapped.
"I can't just pull a gun out of - " Ianto stopped in mid-sentence and briefly considered what he knew of John Hart, especially the things he'd never wanted to know and been told anyway. John grinned at him and bounced on the toes of his stupid ugly boots. " - and if you can, I don't want to know about it."
"At least let me get a drink," John said, and now he was outright sulky.
"FINE."
John skidded away on the gelatinous covering of the barroom floor, skipped through the bodies like a child through a field of daisies, and vaulted over the bar.
"He's been waiting for ages to do something like that, hasn't he?" Ianto murmured. "Drama queen."
"Master?"
"Nevermind."
John stood up, brandishing a bottle of something golden, and clutching something else in his other hand. He snaked round the bar this time, leading with his hips (Ianto wished for perhaps the millionth time that the man would do his belt up properly; there was very little decent or bearable about a middle-aged man with his hips hanging out, no matter how good a shape he was in), and as soon as he was in range he lobbed something blue and shiny directly at Ianto, who fumbled but caught clumsily against his chest.
It was a packet of KP roasted salted peanuts. Quite what a British brand of snack was doing in a bar on an American-owned ship sailing from China to Panama Ianto wasn't too interested in finding out.
"Dunno about you," John explained, presumably because Ianto looked like he'd just been handed a dog turd, "but I'm bloody ravenous." He tore open his own packet of nuts as he strolled between the corpses.
"How can you possibly still have an appetite after all this?" Ianto said, aghast and still a little surprised by the presence of peanuts at all.
"I'm hungry," John said as if it was the most obvious answer in the world, "I didn't magically become full just because the bar smells of dead tourists."
Ianto caught the obvious call-back of his own idiom, but he simply shoved a peanut into his mouth without any enthusiasm and turned to look at the sea in the hopes that it would stop him feeling so disoriented. It didn't. "K-9?"
"Master?"
"Do you at least have a schematic of the ship?" Ianto asked, fully expecting the answer to be in the negative.
"Affirmative, Master."
"Well thank God for that. Can we get back inside the rest of the ship without going through that bloody bar again?"
"Affirmative. The room next to the bar also opens onto this deck. It is designated 'Ballroom #3: The Hayley Carmichael Ballroom'."
Ianto peered over his shoulder. John was standing in the doorway behind him, drinking tequila from the bottle with his head tipped back and his throat naked and stretched like a bird at a birdbath. "Any idea where Micky might be?"
"None - " John wiped the excess tequila from his lips with his hand and wrist. "Haven't seen him since we left Shanghai, pretty much. He went one way, I went another."
"Exactly … when … did you pass out drunk, John?" Ianto frowned as he jiggled the handle to the ballroom door. It was locked, of course.
John looked almost sheepish. "About an hour and a half after I tried to force you to have some fun for once and you stupidly refused."
Ianto stared at him for a minute, managed to contain his irritation, and said, "An hour and a half?"
"Look, have you ever tried to down a litre of whiskey in one?" John said, becoming quite embarrassed and fidgety. "I'm out of practice, it's this fucking era of yours, everything is so tame, you're all lightweights …"
"No, I haven't." Ianto jiggled the door handle again. "K-9, would you?" he added, "Because I am neither insane nor suicidal." He kept the 'anymore' part to himself: on the very long list of personal information John Hart had no reason to be introduced to, how he'd felt and behaved after losing Lisa was quite close to the 'NEVER EVER ANY OF HIS FUCKING BUSINESS' header. "K-9?"
"Master?"
"Unlock this, would you?" Ianto's stomach gurgled and he hastened to silence it with more slightly flatulent peanuts.
"Why so desperate to find old Mick-aye Smiff anyway?" John remarked, stepping through the door as it opened and giving the empty room a quick sweep, a narrow-eyed reconnaissance stare.
"One, he's in charge of this team," Ianto growled, following him at a distance. The distance was one he'd calculated on the plane to Shanghai from Heathrow, the optimum distance for remaining out of John's horrible personal-space invasion tactics, but close enough to be able to throttle him to death when Ianto's temper finally snapped.
"Nominally," John sneered, poking a spangly blue curtain with the butt of his tequila bottle.
"Two, he has the only potential means of communication we have with the outside world. Everything else seems to be dead." Ianto was aware of slurring a little thanks to the bloody codeine, but he also wasn't aware of his infected gouge anymore, which was, he thought, an acceptable trade. "So far I don't know how long we've been adrift, where we are, or if anything or anyone has been able to track us. The Pacific Ocean is big, John, I want to get hold of Cardiff and get us some bloody help!"
"And Mickey has my Vortex Manipulator," John said, peering behind the curtain. "Oooh, fireworks."
"And Mickey has the Vortex Manipulator," Ianto finished. "You don't seem … bothered."
"This is a nice ship. You know if there's been any externally-generated major temporal distortion that thing will be malfunctioning like a toddler with a head-injury," John added, returning with a cardboard box of what Ianto hoped weren't but suspected probably were fireworks. "Design flaw. Bit of a huge one, really. It's how the Lovely Jack and I ended up stuck in a Time Loop for five wildly romantic years. Partly."
Ianto ignored the goad with greater ease than he might have done a few hours - three days - ago; the codeine was good for that, too. "Temporal distortion? Why the hell would there be - "
"We were out for three days," John said, examining a yellow box marked ' Firecra'. "If your fucking dog isn't lying. Which it probably is. But, y'know, even when I'm re-growing my entire liver from the back-up patch I'm not out that fucking long. When was the last time you spent three days flat on your back … " John trailed off and leered at him, "… and unconscious?"
"Put those down," Ianto said, barely containing a twitch.
"Spoilsport," John said, stuffing a box of 'herine Wheel' into his inside jacket pocket. "You never know when you might need something to explode a little."
"What is that, your family motto?" Ianto sighed, leaving the ballroom via the back door.
"No, that was money always comes first," John said without even a trace of mirth, not even the hint of a smile. "Penge altid kommer først, para önce tüm."
The first three corridors they explored were empty and silent, though the third was partially blocked at the other end by the already-festering body of a plump holiday-maker in a red baseball cap. John sidestepped around the hapless cruise passenger without breaking his pace; Ianto put his free hand over his nose and mouth, spilling peanuts from the open packet he still clutched with the other.
"Why are we alive if all these people aren't?" He asked, muffled by his fingers but not at all keen to remove his hand for the sake of mere clarity.
"Don't question good luck," John suggested, bounding down the next corridor with his tequila raised like a club over his head. "Otherwise it stops being lucky."
"I don't believe in luck."
"Really? You know what your darling Captain's nickname was at the Agency?" John kicked a body in some sort of service uniform out of Ianto's way and took an exaggerated swig of his tequila.
"I'm not interested in his life before Torchwood," Ianto said stiffly. It was probably obvious just how much it bothered Ianto that John had known Jack for longer than he; at this moment he didn't really care what John did and didn't know about that.
"Liar," John said cheerfully, pointing the lip of the bottle at Ianto's face. "And his name was Lucky."
"Oh, and what was yours? Arsehole?" Ianto muttered, tip-toeing between two small bodies, trying desperately not to let his bare, dry-dirty toes touch the slimmest millimetre of what had once been a pair of little girls in sailor dresses.
"Actually it was 'Mr. Deathwish'," John paused by an open doorway and held up a finger. He craned his head into the room, then relaxed. "Thought I could hear breathing but it's just flies having a fucking party," he said, as if this were in any way reassuring.
"Maybe we should check them for injuries …" Ianto choked on the stink as John kicked another corpse into the corridor walls ahead of him. "That you haven't inflicted post-mortem! STOP THAT."
John looked affronted. "I was getting them out of the way, so you don't get dead person on your skin," he explained, as though Ianto was stupid rather than simply possessed of a functioning sense of humanity. "They can't feel it, they're dead."
By Ianto's watch they spent two whole hours prowling the corridors, bars, and upper internal decks, and not once did they encounter another living being that wasn't a fly or a trapped and very angry seagull. By the time Ianto and John reached the service decks, where the corridors were narrower and the windows smaller, in the lower reaches of the ship, it was dark outside and Ianto's gut wound was aching again, working its way up to a proper sharp pain, and his temper was not so much frayed as unravelled. He was also very hungry.
"Kitchens," he told K-9. "Find me the kitchens, there has to be some dried food or something in there - " he was interrupted by a noisy gurgle from his stomach, which apparently agreed with him. Ahead of him John bounced over and around a veritable obstacle course of dead maids and stewards. Ianto was a little disturbed by how normal he was coming to find both the behaviour and its prompt.
"Anyone aliiiiiiiive?" John bellowed, banging on doors.
There was a creak.
Both of them froze.
"K-9?" Ianto whispered.
"One live human female in room F-22," K-9 said loudly.
"So much for subtlety," Ianto wearily raised his foot over an extended arm that still held a mobile phone handset, its screen blank, and counted doors to F-22, keeping his eyes resolutely above floor level. "John, if you don't mind …" he added, as John blocked the last few feet.
"If she shoots you," John began. He still had his empty tequila bottle with him, gripped tight by the neck. Ianto rather suspected the end of the sentence was going to be something like I'm going to use you as a shield, you realise?
"I will be very surprised," Ianto said. He banged on the door to F-22 slightly too hard. "Hello? Anyone in there? Hello?"
Silence was the only reply.
"Hello?" Ianto repeated. "We're not dangerous … well, I'm not … we're just looking for other survivors … Hello? If you're in there, please say something, we want to help you … hello?"
"Hello," John added helpfully, "I can't shoot you because I don't have a gun, and Ianto is morally opposed to violence sometimes! Come out! I'm incredibly good-looking! You won't regret it!"
"You would actually make my job easier by committing suicide," Ianto said in a strained voice. "Hello? Is anyone in there?"
Finally the door was unlocked, the clunk of the mechanism loud in the quiet corridor, and Ianto exhaled with relief as he looked down several inches at an anxious face.
"Hello," he said, "I'm Ianto Jones, this is John Hart - "
"Captain," John said sulkily.
"- are you okay?"
The short woman in the doorway stared at him for a moment before saying in a too-loud voice, "Other ear, please."
"Pardon?" Ianto blinked, temporarily non-plussed.
The woman in F-22 was very short - five foot three at most - and wearing kitchen whites without a hairnet over her short black hair. She turned her head and tapped her left ear. "My right ear doesn't work," she said in the same slightly congested tones. "Please say that again."
"Ianto Jones," Ianto repeated, trying to shape his words clearly and use better diction that he usually bothered with, "and John Hart."
"Captain," John repeated.
She nodded to indicate she'd got it this time. "Frankie Hao Lin."
"Frankie?" John snorted. Ianto sighed.
"Easier for you to say than Xiu," Frankie said with a polite attempt at a smile that, Ianto thought, probably masked considerable and entirely deserved contempt. "What is happening?"
"We don't - " Ianto began.
"Dead bodies," John interrupted, far too cheerfully. "Everyone's dead. Except us."
"I know," Frankie said patiently, although she also sounded a little taken aback, "this is why I stayed in my room."
"You got a gun in there?" John asked, and Ianto groaned.
"What did he say?"
"Ignore him, please, he's insane," Ianto suggested.
"I'm not the one walking around a ship full of corpses in my bare feet with an open wound," John observed, "so don't you go impugning my sanity, Eye-Candy."
"Why is he talking about guns?" Frankie asked, too loudly to be whispering. "Is this man your friend?" She looked very worried, and adjusted something behind her right ear - her hearing aid, Ianto supposed.
"NO," he said emphatically.
John was behind him in a single leap, draping an arm over Ianto's shoulder - which he had to stretch up to do - as if he owned him.
"Get off."
"No, he's my lov-er," John drawled.
"I am not, get OFF me," Ianto tried to shrug off the arm.
"We were on our honeymoon," John continued with maddening smarm, bumping Ianto with his hips.
Anger bubbled up through Ianto like gas through swamp water; once upon a time he had planned to get married, he'd tried to guess where he could take Lisa on honeymoon that would be a surprise, that would excite her without making her exasperated that he'd tried too hard, and being reminded of this fact hurt more than a direct poke to the festering hole in his midriff. Through gritted teeth Ianto growled, "Isn't it amazing how I can speak two languages and I still can't find one word in either of them that adequately covers just how much I FUCKING HATE YOU?"
John whipped his arm away without making the usual remark about Ianto being 'beautiful when angry' - Ianto could feel his face burning in the ringing silence that followed his outburst and although he didn't look he could guess that poor Frankie was staring at him. He put his hands over his face - it was hot - and breathed in for so long that his stomach twinged, and finally said in a very quiet voice, "we still need to find Mickey."
"Excuse me," Frankie said, looking from one to the other.
"Yes?" Ianto pulled his hands away from his face. He felt sure he looked like a crazy person, and what with John in the same frame of reference that was entirely unfair.
"Are you leaving?"
"Yes," Ianto sighed. "Yes. Sorry. Yes, we are."
There was a very long silence during which Frankie looked at him and Ianto tried to read her expression and failed, and John began to hum something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like We Are The Champions and Ianto had to bite his lip to remind himself that punching John in the head until he stopped looking and sounding like John would not really put Frankie at ease. Finally he took a step back and said, "Er …do you want to come with us?"
She brightened immediately. "If it isn't any trouble. I don't want to get in your way."
"No trouble."
"I don't want to inconvenience you at all."
John shoved Ianto along the corridor ahead of him and barked over his shoulder, "Stop being fucking polite and get moving."
Frankie stepped out into the corridor, baulked immediately at the banks of corpses piled up against the walls, and stared for a moment at K-9. "What is - "
"That's K-9," Ianto said wearily.
"Robot dog from the future," John elaborated.
"John, shut."
Frankie shrugged, as if to say she'd seen weirder things working on a cruise ship, and averted her gaze from the maids lying on the carpet. A thought struck Ianto. "How …. How long have you been hiding in there?" he pointed back to the room.
"Hours."
"Hours, and not days?" he persisted.
"We were in Shanghai yesterday …" Frankie trailed off and gave Ianto a suspicious look. "…weren't we?"
Ianto shook his head. "What's the last thing you remember before finding … well, before all this … all this happened?"
"I was … I had to take a break from my shift, I had a …" Frankie mimed clutching her stomach and screwed up her face, "… a sickness, a bad one. My lunch was not very fresh. Mr. Denton was embarrassed by this so he said I should sleep until I felt better and he wouldn't take it out of my wages."
"And that's what you did?" The three of them followed K-9 back towards the door they'd entered the corridor by.
"Yes, I slept until I felt better." Frankie turned her head away from a hand that protruded, limp and fly-strewn, from an open door. "I wish I was not such a heavy sleeper."
"I slept through it too," Ianto said gently, "and I'm a very light sleeper. I think something's not right here."
"I think the correct phrase to use now is 'no shit, Sherlock'," John sneered, shoving past them to investigate the staircase with his tequila-club in hand. "Right, Dog, I have to carry you, do I? You're rubbish. Why can't you hover? I could have made a better fucking robot when I was six out of the contents of the bin - "
"Shut up, John," Ianto sighed.
John scooped up K-9 with bad grace and glared back over his shoulder at Ianto and Frankie. "So if we meet anything dangerous what am I going to do, throw Winalot here at them?"
"K-9 can hold them off," Ianto decided not to mention the little dog's laser capabilities until it was absolutely necessary for John to know about them.
"With what, pedantry?"
"John, shut up."
As John trudged up the stairs with K-9 in his arms, bitching under his breath at every step, Frankie whispered to Ianto, "Is he …?" concluding with a fairly graphic and easy-to-interpret gesture.
"Er, no, more …" Ianto made a circular 'everyone' gesture.
"Oh. And … um … you?"
Ianto thought about this for a while, taking the stairs slowly, one at a time. "I'm …" he reached the first landing. "I'm … taken."
"No you're not," John said from half-way up the next flight of stairs. "He doesn't care and you know he doesn't, you're just deluding yourself - "
"K-9," Ianto said in a loud voice, "feel free to electrocute John when you get to the Top Deck. As many volts as you can spare."
The rest of the journey was undertaken more or less in silence; Ianto had to go ahead of John to wrestle with the final door-handle and nearly fell on hid face as he forgot about the six-inch-high metal lip of the doorway. The only thing that stopped him was John's forearm as the man tucked K-9 into his opposite armpit and blocked the doorway with his free arm.
"You're not fit to lead a pillow fight," John said, jumping out onto the salt-slippery deck and depositing the robot without much in the way of care.
Ianto inhaled. The air was clear and clean and salty, and he could tell there must be more unfortunate bodies some fifty yards down from them, for a flock of assorted seabirds had congregated on one spot and were making a truly infernal racket as they squabbled and bounced and sniped at each other. Ianto had never been particularly comfortable with the cries of seagulls - they always sounded like they were laughing - and with the addition of a wide gamut of other avian opportunists to the cacophony the whole chorus sounded like half of hell had got loose and got drunk.
"You really think Mickey's up here?" he asked, doubting it already.
John shrugged. "It doesn't smell as bad as inside, does it?"
Ianto turned to help Frankie over the lip of the door but she'd already made her own way over; he supposed if she worked on the ship she probably already had plenty of practice dealing with the bizarre doorways.
The three of them and K-9 began heading bow-wards, towards the cloud of seabirds, and Ianto realised the end of his bandage had come loose.
As they got closer the cries of the fighting birds grew louder and harsher, until, within twenty feet or so, they were so violent and raucous that Ianto winced at them. John ran at the birds, waving his arms and shouting, and the whole great cloud of them - some of which he'd only ever seen on TV before - took off like a picnic blanket being unfurled.
They didn't stay away long, but it was long enough for everyone to catch a glimpse of what they had been feeding upon; the slightly bloated forms of one adult and one child.
The birds had been at them so thoroughly that it was impossible to tell the sex or race of either, and from both bodies long ropes of stinking entrails had been tugged by fierce bird beaks, flopping in great grey cables as they uncoiled around the bared flesh and stained clothing. Ianto's throat closed over at once - he saw Frankie's eyes widen, and she clamped her hand over her mouth.
They both dashed for the side of the ship, but it was Frankie, unhindered by a rotting gut wound that jarred at every step, who got there first.
What happened next was to haunt Ianto for many worried years to come, which, in a lifetime as full of traumas as his had already been, was something of an achievement.
As Frankie stood on tip-toes and gripped the rail to steady herself, her back heaving, something long and dark and wide and impossibly fast zipped out of the dark waters like a bad dream - the first Ianto saw of it was the towering, dripping, shadowy thing slipping itself around Frankie's waist like an affectionate arm.
She yelled, but before Ianto could even blink both tentacle and cook had gone, and the wheeling, shrieking seabirds had already begun to settle on their morbid supper again.
"Did that just happen?" Ianto asked in a shrill voice, very rattled indeed. He wanted to hold something to keep himself upright, but the options were John and a railing over which someone had just disappeared, and neither seemed particularly safe. "Did a fucking huge tentacle just - "
John nodded, an inappropriate and alarming light dancing in his eyes like the reflection of a burning building. "When I come from those things are extinct," he said, his teeth gleaming under the ship's floodlights. "They were just a footnote in one class on naturally occurring time manipulating species … I spent three fucking days trying to sleep through hours and hours of crap about Why Gallifrey Was An Example To Us All About How Neutrality Can Never Work - but those things - "
"Wait - wait - wait - " Ianto squeezed his eyes shut. The afterimage of Frankie vanishing into the night remained. "What are you talking about? A tentacle just pulled Frankie into the fucking sea, we've got to save her … somehow …"
"No it didn't," John said, his eyes still sparkling.
"What? I just saw - "
"It pulled her into a temporal pocket." John looked like he'd just stumbled on a goldmine guarded by a dormouse. "K-9!"
K-9 remained silent.
"K-9, can you scan for recent temporal distortions and prove my bloody point to Mr. Slow here?" John was all but skipping from foot to foot.
K-9 said nothing.
"Don't ignore me, you miserable piece of tin shit!"
"I am not programmed to take orders from you," K-9 beeped.
"YOU WHAT?"
Ianto turned back to stare at the dark sea which rocked the huge ship like a gentle hand. There was not so much as a ripple to act as a sign of anything lurking below the water. "K-9, humour him, please."
"Humouring." There was a grinding beep that sounded unpleasantly like a computer with toast in the disk drive.
"Massive temporal distortion has just occurred five point two feet from John Hart." K-9 confirmed.
"I told you." John stared out to sea. "If I could only get one of those fuckers back to … I could make a fortune. I could buy a galaxy with that kind of money. No one's seen one for thousands of years …"
"John," Ianto said, too tired to be anything but exasperated, "we have to rescue Frankie if there's any chance she's still alive - it's our fault she was up here - "
"Actually it was your fault," John grinned and bounced on his toes.
" - that thing might have other people wherever it's taken her - "
"What?" John dragged his gaze away from the ocean again. "Probably." He sounded distracted. "The question is how I'd catch one in this backward bloody century - "
"John," Ianto snapped. "Rescue, not … hunting." He tried to tuck the end of his bandage into his pyjama trousers, but it just fell back out again right away. His hands were, he noticed, beginning to shake a little. Not at all helpful for staging a rescue attempt against something the size of a … well, something with tentacles that big. "I suppose if we just stay here it'll come back for us?"
"Eh?" John gave him a you are insane look. "Hell no."
"You're right," Ianto murmured, no longer really listening, putting the heels of his hands to his temples, trying to force his thoughts clear through sheer effort of will, "we need some sort of a -"
Which was as far as he got. A splash caught his attention and truncated his sentence. He didn't have time to do more than try to work out from where it had come before several thick feet of slimy, ice-cold muscle slapped itself around his midriff and tugged.
The pain from his wound was so excruciating, so staggeringly intense from nowhere, that Ianto promptly lost his grip on consciousness and tumbled into the engulfing arms of the black.
PART TWO